The fast-paced world of Samurai Gunn might not be forgiving, but it’s most definitely fun.

The blade is fast but the bullet is faster. Heed those words when approaching Samurai Gunn, a new action platformer from Maxistentialism available on PC via Steam, but soon to be released on PS4, PS Vita and Mac.

Playing across four 2D environments, you guide a gun-toting samurai through battle against your friends or, in the single player, legions of black-hooded ninjas who are just as nimble as you and also pack heat. Everyone gets three bullets max and there are no power-ups, so the focus is on swordplay.

If you got high before playing BioShock Infinite last year, we’ve got the column for you.

While Game On will continue to be The Denver Post’s main site for video game news and reviews, and DenverPost.com/VideoGames will continue to run the best national video games articles from the print edition of the paper, we thought we should tell you about a new player in town.

We’ve recently launched a video games column on The Cannabist — our brand-spanking new site dedicated to marijuana culture — called High Scores (haha), which looks at the long and loving relationship between video games and cannabis.

Batman: Arkham Origins isn’t exactly a step back for the vaunted franchise, but it’s still light on innovation.

The Batman Arkham series is arguably the best superhero video game franchise ever made. Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009) and its sequel Batman: Arkham City (2011), developed by Rocksteady Studios, were given top-notch ratings across the board from the storytelling to gameplay mechanics. The games were so well-done that fans were continually anticipating the next chapter. Of course the games’ publisher, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, was more than happy oblige.

Rocksteady Studios, however, was off working on another super-secret superhero project so in-house developer Warner Bros. Games Montreal took the reins to develop a prequel to the Arkham series. Set five years before the events of Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham Origins finds the Dark Knight still a bit green, unpolished and obsessive. Although we like Batman any way we can get him, with a new team behind Origins, can it live up to Arkham expectations or is the game a quick cash grab?

When it comes to the plot of Batman: Arkham Origins you have to let go of the stories from the comics because the folks at Warner Bros. are rewriting history a bit. In the game, Batman has only been fighting crime for about two years and has Gothamites wondering if his existence is myth or reality.

Black Mask, a familiar villain in the Batman universe, knows that the Dark Knight exists and sets a bounty on his head worth $50 million. Mask calls up eight assassins that includes Bane, Deathstroke, Deadshot, and Electrocutioner to fulfill the task. Batman also meets The Joker for the first time. It doesn’t matter that in other Batman universes there’s a history to the relationships with these villains. Here they just show up for some cash.

When the assassins are introduced, however, things quickly get very exciting.

Ellen Page was born to be in video games. Unfortunately, Beyond: Two Souls doesn’t quite do her presence justice.

Plenty of praise was heaped upon the 2010 game Heavy Rain, which blended film noir storytelling and intuitive gameplay to approach a version of the movie/video-game hybrid that futurists have been predicting for the last couple decades.

It was an experiment and one that wasn’t always successful, but it at least proved it was possible for action-adventure gameplay and dramatic narratives to coexist without too much friction.

Heavy Rain Writer-director David Cage is back with the PlayStation 3 exclusive Beyond: Two Souls, and it ups the ante toward the film side of things in almost every way. Hollywood stars Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe anchor the overall excellent cast, the score includes contributions from vaunted composer Hans Zimmer, and the fantastical plot twists are straight out of the latest graphic novel-turned-blockbuster.

Unfortunately, the inconsistent and often confusing gameplay turns it into something you’d rather watch than interact with — even as it remains an occasionally fascinating experiment in digital boundary-pushing.

The current generation of gamers seems to have lost patience for playing in stealth. Instead of trying to outwit enemies, it’s easier to go in guns blazing and grenades exploding and move on to the next mission.

That was the case for 2010’s Splinter Cell: Conviction. The Tom Clancy Splinter Cell franchise is mostly known as a stealth-action experience, but in 2010, Conviction concentrated more on the action. That was fine because it was a great game, but was it the end of the true stealth era in games?

For Splinter Cell: Blacklist, that’s a resounding no.

Don’t get it twisted — Splinter Cell: Blacklist does still have some of the elements of Conviction, like the “mark-and-execute” where you can blast two or more enemies at once without breaking a sweat. But it’s an option.

A little help goes a long way in exploring the intimidatingly vast world of Grand Theft Auto 5.

By any mobile, console, PC, or dystopian nightmare virtual reality standard, Grand Theft Auto V is a groundbreaking game. Its open-world map is bigger than all previous Grand Theft Auto games combined, and about three times larger than Rockstar Games’ huge western playground in Red Dead Redemption.

Since its release last Tuesday, gamers have been luxuriating in not just the sheer number of structured and achievement-grabbing things they can do, but the more unstructured time-passers. There are the impromptu raids and shooting sprees, races, chases, sports and all manner of fool’s errands for which the GTA series has become famous. But there’s also a new depth of character, weapons and vehicles customizations.

Of course, it’s considered a sin in hardcore gaming to use a guidebook, play anything on “easy,” or call up any trophy-killing cheats. Games have been getting easier over the years, so why can’t we just trust the designers’ visions? Etcetera.

True as that may be, getting a leg up on games is a time-honored tradition. What else is modding all about? (Skyrim is perhaps the most modded game ever, and I’ll bet all my dust-gathering NES cartridges that casual gamers aren’t the ones writing code to up-res textures or morph broadswords into lightsabers.)

Really, this is what gaming is at heart — testing the limits of constructed world and being rewarded or punished for how well you do in it. GTAV pretty much dares us to see if we can break it.

Despite repetitive gameplay, the story in Lost Planet 3 redeems this chilly prequel.

Is 2013 the year of the prequel? Publishers seem to be running out of forward-thinking story ideas so quickly that they’ve resorted to going back to origin stories en masse. This year we’ve already seen prequels for Gears of War, Tomb Raider, God of War, XCOM and then Batman’s Arkham franchise in October.

The thing with prequels is that we’re visiting a character or story already knowing how it ends. It’s potentially difficult to create any drama in the storyline because we already know the outcome. For Capcom’s Lost Planet 3, however, that’s not a problem.

Lost Planet 3 takes places decades before the first Lost Planet game, where the planet E.D.N. III is still an ice world (in Lost Planet 2, the ice was melted and it became a tropical environment). You play as Jim Peyton, a contractor hired by construction company NEVEC to help harvest T-Energy, a valuable mineral on the planet and inside the planet’s creatures, which could help humans back on Earth.

But Peyton’s sole purpose is just to make enough money to take care of his wife and young son back on Earth. That is, until he finds out the truth about NEVEC and E.D.N. III.

Hey there, DuckTales, how’ve you been all these years? Looking good, I see.

I’m not really a sucker for nostalgia.

While it is fun to reminisce about how great it was to experience some music, movies or video games at some special point in your life, I don’t dwell on it and I never try to recreate that experience. And I usually shun anything that tries to do it all the time (Hi, Nintendo). I like new ideas, new stories and new technology as opposed to remakes, remixes and remasters.

Which brings us to DuckTales: Remastered. Originally released in 1989 for the 8-bit NES, Disney’s DuckTales was based on the popular animated TV series. The platformer starred Scrooge McDuck and his nephews Huey, Louie and Dewey as they traveled across the world to find treasure. It was hit back in the day and one of Capcom’s most successful games.

So why not try to give it another shot since everyone is on this ’80s nostalgia kick (Transformers, G.I. Joe, Mario, etc.)?

If you love visceral shooters with a great story… this may not be the game for which you’re looking.

With the success and positive reviews of last year’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the folks at 2K Games decided to continue the franchise with a spinoff/prequel to the XCOM story. The Bureau: XCOM Declassified takes us back to the 1960s at the beginning of the alien invasion and the formation of the organization that battles them.

You play as Agent William Carter, a CIA agent who finds himself unwillingly recruited into XCOM to help the fight against the alien force and find out why they’re invading.

The gameplay is different than XCOM: Enemy Unknown. While Enemy Unknown was more of an in-depth turn-based strategy game, The Bureau is a straight-up shooter with elements from other games you might be familiar with. The run-and-cover-and-shoot system is very similar to Gears of War mechanics, and it works. There’s the familiarity and comfort of being behind a wall and popping out to aim and shoot at an enemy, then going back to cover.

Lego games are always enjoyable to play. I haven’t had a bad moment playing the games because most of the time there is always some fun, witty plot and jokes packed inside each one. Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes is no different.

The game pulls from the epic story of Batman and meshes it into world of Lego bricks. The Wii U version reviewed here is the exact version same that was recently released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The game does not utilize the game pad on the Wii U; however, it is still enjoyable to play and hasn’t lost its luster.

A&E reporter John Wenzel has covered a variety of topics for The Denver Post over the years, including video games, comedy, music and the fine arts. He's been playing and loving video games since his dad brought home a sweet ColecoVision in 1983. Catch him on PSN as beardsandgum.

Hugh got his start writing for the Cheyenne and Woodmen Edition newspapers in Colorado Springs. In 2011 he moved to Denver where he has written for Denver Urban Spectrum and Colorado Community Media’s Wheat Ridge Transcript. Hugh joined The Denver Post in 2014 as an editorial assistant.